


What Love Was

by WolfVenom



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Character Death, Heavy Angst, M/M, Major Character Injury, Major Character Undeath, Pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-08-13 07:23:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7967662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfVenom/pseuds/WolfVenom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside of us while we live." -Norman Cousins</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Love Was

**Author's Note:**

> Short painfic that is long overdue. Might do fluff later? I had a big picture in my mind over what I wanted to do with this fic, make it 60k or something, but I shortened it and removed lots of characters because I'm lazy and wanted this done today.

There's a feeling in your stomach you get when you realize something is wrong. When you accidentally break your mother's antique vase and wait in tense silence for the punishment, the heat in your belly of knowing that you can't walk your way out of the consequences this time.

He knew it all too well, noticed the signs and picked up on the plan the moment it was set in motion; too late. He felt it when he watched as hundreds of thousands of bastion units tore through the front line made up of rookies - men and women no older then twenty - and even when they announced him as the newly appointed Strike Commander of Overwatch, Reyes sitting right beside him.

And he felt it even worse when his eyes locked upon Gabriel's, the rumble of the base reverberating through every hall, just before flames engulfed both of their terrified gazes.

Jack Morrison had loved Gabe. Woke up every morning swollen with joy over the fact that through this war, he could look at Reyes and feel safe. Nights of pain shared with one another after a brutal mission just relishing in one another's touch. Everyone needed love in times like these, to take care of one another and keep sane. Maybe Jack just didn't do it correctly.

He thinks this as he pulls himself out from underneath a slab of concrete, leg completely crushed underneath the weight. There's dust in his eyes, burning as each blink sends the little particles farther and farther behind his retina, and the blood pooling across his eyelids isn't helping. Faintly, in he back of his mind, he realizes that he can't even feel the wounded leg, nor anything else below his waist, but something else occupies his mind. Gabe was in the blast too.

Jack can't see anything but foggy shapes and blurred lines, but he looks all over for a black blob that would lead him to his body, or a strong scent of blood to guide him. He digs through rubble and attempts to work feeling back into his legs, pulling himself to his feet using a hunk of wall which failed to fall. There's a heavy buzzing in the back of his head, and when he brings fingers to the base of his skull gingerly, his hand comes back soaked in blood and dare he say, maybe even a shredded sliver of flesh. But he had to find Gabe.

_Did he really?_

Jack felt his way through what used to be the Swiss base, occasionally stumbling into heavy obstacles that he soon found out where the charred bodies of his comrades. He couldn't bare to believe any of them Gabe. He was alive. He knew it.

When the sirens started blaring, coming closer and closer, Jack fell to his knees, fighting away tears and clutching the shreds of his shirt to his chest, where his entire torso had been singed to a burnt crisp. He couldn't stick around when the police came.

_"I'm so sorry, Gabe...."_

He fell to his knees, miles away, and screamed, cried, and thrashed around, mourning over the life that had been destroyed, over Gabe, and how he couldn't even find a body to bury. To spend their last moments latched onto one another and sharing in their demise, knowing if they were going to die, they could find peace of mind knowing it was together, filled with love.

And Reyes watched Jack walk away. Leave his broken body underneath the remains of what he built and to suffer.

Mercy found him like that. A metal truss completely severing his lower half (and hand) from his body, huge shards of shrapnel embedded in his shoulder and a gaping hole in his chest from where a rafter had impaled him. He was choking to death, she could see. His body shook heavily and his teeth chattered, blood loss chilling his body, and a slit throat slowly dribbling away. (He would've died too, had a busted piece of scaffolding not wedged itself in the hole of his throat.)

She nearly lost her lunch there, seeing a dear friend lying broken, unrecognizable, and blood coating every surface in a five meter radius from his body.

She couldn't save Jack. She would save Gabe.

But with a prototype staff and medical knowledge only teetering on cardiac arrest and loss of extremities, she failed both of them.

***

Gabe could still - to this day - feel his own insides scraping against the gritty stones of the Swiss base. The nausea that came with your own stomach hanging out of your body and the phantom pains where your limbs used to be. He could flex his arms and wiggle his toes now, but every movement broke his body down into ash, only to rebuild themselves agonizingly slow seconds after. Every cell was dying and being brought back again, and it felt like someone was peeling the skin off of his very body and shaving away all the tissues underneath with a scalpel until all that remained were bones.

Souls couldn't bring back the one he had lost when Jack left him to die that day. But maybe consuming the soul of the one who killed him would repair everything.

But when he had those plans set, ready to trigger, he was reminded of those nights spent after a hot shower cuddled up to Jack's body and falling asleep to the feeling of something so warm and alive beneath him. Of tender kisses and tangled limbs and pure unadulterated affection, now every memory of soft lips upon his skin was sharp pain upon his body. And he could never get it back.

Because that day, they had both became ghosts. To never feel warmth or love again.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry for the bad fic hahaha I promise I'll do better next time.


End file.
